Wednesday, December 14, 2011

The problem with TV is?

Of particular concern are shows that are violent, gendered, sexualised, and have advertising aimed at children.

But parents say such content is "difficult to avoid" and only half have rules on what their kids can watch, down from 80 per cent 15 years ago.

Two things leaped out at me. First, that in 50% of households children can watch anything on TV. And second, that there are parents who are concerned that TV shows are "gendered".

The concern about "gendering" is a liberal one. Liberals want us to be self-determined; our sex though is predetermined; so liberals want our sex not to matter in life. So they hold sex distinctions to be socially constructed and believe that children should not be exposed to "gendered" patterns of life on TV.

Such liberal parents should probably not take their kids to the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill. I stopped off there the other day to get money from an ATM. I passed by four or five 20-something women who had clearly been watching the TV show Mad Men. They were wearing the most beautiful and elegant dresses and looked gorgeously feminine.

And yet given the voting patterns in the area, there's a decent chance that these young women were Greens voters.

So even in trendier lefty areas, the campaign for a genderless society is not going so well. It's going to be difficult to persuade young men that gender is a social construct when young women present themselves in such a charismatically feminine way.

16 comments:

The problem with the liberal ideal of non-gendering and autonomous choice of gender identity is it always turns into pressure in the contrary direction. Since they believe that boys are being indoctrinated with "toxic masculinity" and girls are being molded into Stepford wives, liberal parents tend to try to make their daughters more masculine and their sons more feminine.

The only thing I watch on television is old episodes of Star Trek, and this new show "Once Upon a Time" and Vampire Diaries (both feature alcohol drinking...very odd that they are pushing that on all white shows for teens and children)

That's it.

I find the interracial couples very disturbing and have long since decided that my children will not watch television other than old DVD's.

Pechorin said...I survived my liberal parents trying to make me a 'sissy boy' when I was a child. Only really because I matured early and have been blessed/cursed with exaggerated male sex characteristics.Even among adult males I still possess and abnormaly high amount of masculinity.Nature has a way of flipping the bird to liberals.

I watch the Vampire Diaries too- the drinking is disdainful but there is a great story despite the detractions and a more realistic heroine. I was sick of female human protagonists going 'I want to be a vampire, beautiful and young forever' and cheered when Elena didn't want to be a vampire and lose her opportunity to grow up, to start a family, have children and grow old and she viewed it as a tragedy. A limited lifetime versus narcissism and shallow immortality.

What's been best in this season is Caroline's father returning and torturing her for being a vampire and being unable to accept her nature- even as he is a homosexual. Completely intolerant and a really candid look at what most gays are, intolerant and hypocrites.

You'd be interested to know that in the book series, Bonnie is not African American. She is white, with red, hair green eyes, Irish and a sweet personality, kind hearted with a dislike of hurting people unlike the new politically correct 'improved' Bonnie.

I was watching the 1970 British film (based on a book written in the early 1900s) called The Railway Children, and the best thing about it is that the girls all not only dress modestly and beautifully, but they also act feminine.Actually, 'gendered' television and movies are becoming less and less common, so why are liberals complaining?A funny thing about the Disney adaptation of C. S. Lewis' 'Prince Caspian' is that they make Queen Susan the Gentle the exact opposite of gentle. In the books, she hates killing and fighting and war (hence the title 'the Gentle'), yet in the movie she's standing with the archers yelling at them to fire and being very unladylike. She also kills a man; a man whom, in the books, she was merely supposed to frighten off by shooting his helmet with an arrow.